"Sweat Combustion Engine"

Whether it's called reducing overhead, streamlining, or "operational excellence," it is managment's goal across all industries to get the fewest number of people to do the greatest amount of work for the lowest possible wages. That's not a secret; it's almost invariably a stated business goal. In the bad old days BEFORE unions, this deliberately adversarial (and often murderous) approach by management was simply accepted by a workforce with no recourse. The adversity was all one way. If you lost an arm working for the railroad or the mills, then by God you just gave an arm to the cause of the great American Elites. Fuck you and your starving family, you were just a tiny cog in the blood-drinking machine that built the Rockefellers and Mellons and DuPonts. The American Oligarchy (or Plutocracy, whatever you want to call the moneyed folks who ran and still run the show) was not answerable to anyone for their abuse of men women and children in the workforce. If someone thought two cents per bushel of tomatoes or artichokes was a little low, the machinery of law enforcement would simply be brought to bear against those "agitators" who posited that five cents and a water break might be more humane. That machinery, of course, was quite simple: guns and clubs.

Then slowly, like ripples presaging a tsunami, workers started calling bullshit on their overseers, and doing so in numbers. The barons running the show still had cops and national guard beat the fuck out of and murder folks crying for something approaching a living wage, but enough workers were abused and desperate enough that production began to be affected. Let a field of artichokes begin to rot, and management would finally put down their lobster forks and take notice. Organization. Fraternity. Solidarity. The highest of human virtues. Abused and beaten people coming together for the good of the whole. Anyone who thinks the murderous fucks of United Fruit would have responded to anything but a kick in their wallets is hopelessly (and possibly deliberately) naive. Anyone who thinks that management today would treat workers like anything but cattle without the continual threat of a work stoppage is hopelessly (and possibly deliberately) naive. The Oligarchy has no conscience or goal beyond making money and sharing that money with as few people as possible. I make a living wage in humane working conditions ONLY because workers before me stood up and folded their arms. What the organization of workers did was create an opposition to the adversity visited upon them by their owners and operators. It is unfortunate that said relationship has to exist, but to pretend, as Maury does, that it doesn't exist, and that workers should just take what's offered and shut up, is, again, hopelessly naive. Let the unions dissolve and the threat of work stoppages disappear, and you'll see how fast wages drop and workers' protections go away. To posit that our ruling merchant class would act in a fashion other than predatory is to ignore the whole of American business history.

The logic that says workers should not organize and fight for wages or pensions or health insurance ultimately ends in slavery. Of course it is vastly more efficient to just own slaves, stop paying wages and give them just enough bread and water to keep them alive and working. Very low overhead, no regulation, and you can just beat or shoot problems. Maury and folks like him should just follow their logic to its conclusion and advocate the legalization of slavery. At least they would be intellectually honest for a change.

Much Peace.